May 2008

Work Pleasure

The other day I cleaned off the top of my desk. This involved sorting the rubble into mounds that had something in common, and then dealing with each mound. There were bills to pay, records to update, forms to be completed, faxes to be sent, licenses to approve, documents to file, tax issues to unscramble, and on and on.

When I was done, my desk was breathtakingly clear of debris. Gazing at my uncharacteristically pristine work space, a peculiar joy came over me. As I walked from my office back to my home, I felt lighter. There was a bounce to my step. I’m reasonably sure my body was creating extra endorphins.

It made me wonder if other people get an actual physical pleasure from doing work, at least the kind where you accomplish something, no matter how unimportant. My guess is that people who work long hours get a sort of charge every time they complete a discrete task. People who don’t get that charge, on average, probably find jobs where they can work fewer hours.

I recall my corporate days, where I would spend eight hours refining a Powerpoint presentation that, in all likelihood, would have no impact on the business. I always felt a charge of pleasure when it was done. Each time I reviewed the beauty and majesty of my graphs and bullet points, I would get a new little surge.

I think the pleasure of completed work is what makes blogging so popular. You have to believe most bloggers have few if any actual readers. The writers are in it for other reasons. Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn. All you get is the pleasure of a completed task.

Do you get pleasure from completing relatively unimportant tasks? And if so, do you work more than 40 hours per week, including optional work such as blogging?

Comments

Hi all!
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I do not know whether I will get a reply for this. I was an avid blogger before I became a copywriter. The day I became a copywriter, the blogger died. I have never ever been able to write a line since the day without scrutiny. It is as if I write it for a defined target audience who would criticize me. The days of the free mind are over.
Will I ever be able to regain the young rebel with a pen and a cause?

Are you kidding? If relatively few people got satisfaction from accomplishing the "little things" then there would be no homemakers or stay-at-home parents and the world as we know it would not exist today. 40 hours per week? Yeah, right...

For some reason, all of the tasks line up in my head and it seems there will be no end and I can easily get overwhelmed and depressed about how unexciting much of life is. I have to have the daily _list_ of tasks. I get a smallish zing when I get to cross off a task from this list. If the task presents a challenge I will start procrastinating. Currently in this category: working on learning HTML, learning ArcView, and exercise. In these efforts, I have to have "the list", the calendar, notation on the calendar for every day that I have worked on the task, AND I have to have "the treat" I give myself for every day I work on the goal. Yeah--sounds very kindergarten. But, I gotta do what I gotta do.

i also feel quite awesome whenever i finish a blog post. and its not about how many people will read it. you hit the nail on the head. its just the feeling of accomplishment. i can never wait to publish. and i feel proud of it.

same thing applies to cleaning desks and things like that. except the joy is tainted if your back aches at the end of it, i think. you curse instead.

I do get pleasure from completing unimportant tasks. I have done the workaholic thing in the past, but I believed that what I was doing was important back then.

Nowadays, procrastination is my main vice. It actually makes me unhappy to not accomplish things, but I will still let them lie until something catches fire.

Often I substitute something I'd rather be doing, like blogging, for something that I ought to be doing, like my taxes. Not only will I take great care in crafting the blog, but I will usually read my own blog after it's done multiple times in what would be a pretty obvious display of narcissism if it wasn't such a private endeavor. The whole thing can be fairly masturbatory. Hey look, I'm wasting time responding to your blog.

Wow, I'm surprised noone mentioned Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on the state of "flow". He claimed that people enjoy themselves the most not on the beach lying around doing nothing, but taking action under certain circumstances, especially when they had immediate feedback.

I work 40 hours a week in a corporate setting. I'm big on getting everything done before I leave the office, especially if I'm leaving for a vacation. If I can get all of my tasks completed and my desk cleared off, I am thrilled.

The answer depends on what a person considers to be "unimportant" I get most of my satisfaction from completing manual labor tasks such as yard work or working on my bikes/jeep. I do work 40 hrs as a computer tech and my desk is always a wreck, strangely enough, the one time a year (or when my boss can't stand looking at it anymore) that I clean it, I do feel immense satisfaction, shortly followed by a panic attack because I no longer know where any of my stuff is located.

I get a kick out of finishing reading a backlog of Dilbert Blog posts.

Unfortunately it only lasts a day or two, and then another backlog develops. I put it off as long as possible, but I know that eventually I have to buckle down and read them again. Oh what satisfaction to know that I've caught up with you again!

This monday, I was dead tired and sleepy after the long weekend, having slept just 3 hrs all night and flown two hrs to get home. The house was puffed up with dust as it was unused for a little over 3 weeks, I just had to clean it before making a move to work. After I was all done, I felt so good, I didn't sleep for an hr as planned earlier, just freshened up and went straight to work. Unfortunately, it doesn't work every time though.

I love certain kinds of work and hate others. I get no sense of accomplishment from cleaning up random junk, but I feel great doing a bunch of doodles.

I just did the math and I found out my art school makes me work 68 hours per week. One magazine that listed the undergraduate schools with the largest freshman workload had my school at the top of the list. MIT was number 2. I do extra work, drawing is something I do all the time.

Aside from my desk job (which really offers minimal job satisfaction...) I get a ton of joy out of menial tasks. I do video logs and they bring me quite a bit of joy.

When I manage to overcome some techinical problem, however, that is like reaching nirvana. Just the other day my boss wanted me to fix her computer- and after 2 hours of wrestling with the box of shit, I managed to fix all errors and bugs. For the rest of the afternoon I was walking on air.

. . . i have several jobs that i do, and each one has that thrill of completion after doing a session with someone or teaching a class. but what really hit me about your post was that sense of accomplishment after cleaning your desk, feeling lighter afterwards. could it be that it's also not having physical clutter in your visual field, or To Do clutter in your mental field? very feng shui, that . . . :)

I hate everything about my job! Well, come to think about it, i don't hate the money...it's more a feeling of abysmal despair (but hey, i guess that's ok, because i am supposed to feel a lot of job satisfaction and be grateful and everything)
The best part is: my job is keeping me from doing anything i like.
It could be a nice (i.e.bearable) job if non-existent organization and cooperation wouldn't make this job a living hell. The worst part is: i am not Wally. I actually still care about my performance, even if the best i can hope for is a sense of relief for every job done.
So the answer is: No, no adrenaline rush but feeling my dissolving stomach does count too, does it?

Whoa, i didn't know i feel that bad...good thing we are not in a high building ;O)
One of my highest priorities on my personal to-do-list is - surprise! - looking for another job. Now that will be an all-time high!!

I definitely feel that rush and pride when I craft a good e-mail or document.

I hate paperwork because I don't get that rush just filling out a little form.

I love providing tech support because I get a similar rush (with more of a messianical feel) with each person helped. I've done it for many years and never get tired of it as long as there is a good mix of simple problems and interesting problems.

Scott, I didn't read your blog, I'm just commenting to see how well I can do pretending as if I had. Overall I think that most people would agree with you if you're trying to say that you're just speaking for yourself. Otherwise, it would not make sense in the broader context of free will versus quantum fluctuations of the vacuum field. However we may be witnessing a paradigm shift of sorts, if you will. Good work. You are very funny!